Vilnius  - Lithuania's central bank intervened Monday to quell devaluation jitters that have gathered pace in the Baltic state in recent days.

After a weekend during which currency exchange offices reported unusually strong demand for foreign currency, Reinoldijus Sarkinas, governor of the Bank of Lithuania, declared that there was no plan to change the current exchange rate of the national currency, the litas.

"There are no grounds for a litas devaluation - that would be beneficial to no-one and we would not solve any problems in this way," Sarkinas said in a release designed to reassure savers that their money is safe.

"Rumours about devaluation are primarily harmful to the people who trust such gossip and run into commercial banks to exchange litas into foreign currency. Tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, they will have to go once again to these banks and exchange the currency into litas," he warned.

Devaluation rumours are a perennial feature of life in the Baltics, where many have memories of losing their savings after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the Russian banking crisis of 1998.

As with the Estonian kroon and Latvian lats, pressure has been building on the litas because it is pegged to the euro.

While the currency valuses across central and eastern Europe have tumbled recently, the Baltic currencies have been kept at levels some analysts argue are artificially high. (dpa)